Ryu Jun Yeol | 류준열 | About

Ryu Jun Yeol is a South Korean actor. He read film at the University of Suwon on a scholarship, paying his way with part-time work — after-school teacher, pizza delivery, day labour — and did his national service as a public officer from 2007 to 2009, before he had acted at all. He started in short and independent films in 2012, took a bit part in "INGtoogi: The Battle of Internet Trolls" (2013), and drew his first real notice as the lead of "Socialphobia" (2015).

"Reply 1988" arrived the same year. As Kim Jung Hwan — the one who says almost nothing and means all of it — he took Best New Actor in television at the 52nd Baeksang Arts Awards, along with rising-star prizes at the tvN10 Awards, the Korea Cable TV Awards and the Asia Artist Awards. A poll by Sports Donga named him the most popular rising star of 2016 with 10,138 of 13,974 votes, and the 1,500 tickets to his first fan meeting, at Yonsei University in April that year, went in two minutes.

He has worked mostly in film since: "The King" (2017), which brought him a second Baeksang, this time Best New Actor in film; "A Taxi Driver" (2017); "Little Forest" and "Believer" (2018), the first Korean film to pass five million admissions that year; "Money" and "The Battle: Roar to Victory" (2019); "Alienoid" (2022) and its sequel; and "The Night Owl" (2022), which won him Best Actor at both the Baeksang and the Chunsa Film Art Awards. Forbes placed him on its Korea Power Celebrity list three years running — 14th in 2017, 36th in 2018, 11th in 2019. He returned to television with "Lost" (2021) and Netflix's "The 8 Show" (2024).

He is also a photographer. He spent several months in Los Angeles across 2019 and 2020 under his English name, Anthony, studying at UCLA and shooting, and showed the results in Seoul in November 2020 as "Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood". Filming "Youth Over Flowers: Africa" in 2016 turned him into an environmental campaigner: he has given to Greenpeace repeatedly, spoken to President Moon Jae In about plastic packaging, and walked the DMZ Peace Trail with him in 2019. He follows football closely enough to have played a five-a-side match against Diego Maradona and Pablo Aimar before the 2017 U-20 World Cup draw in his home city.